Major Power Outage Across Northern Holland Causes Disruption

Large areas across the Netherlands have been left without electricity causing severe disruption. The north of the country has been mainly affected.

According to the Dutch electricity network operator the outage was caused by a power grid overload.

RT reports: The capital Amsterdam has been affected, along with the area around Schiphol Airport. Twitter has reported that some hospitals in Amsterdam have been left without power, while the tram and metro networks are also not running in the capital. The Dutch electricity network operator TenneT says on its website that the outage has been caused by the power grid becoming overloaded. A spokeswoman for the airport said it did suffer a temporary outage, but is now running on backup power, the ANP news agency reports.

The outage was caused due to a defect at a power station in Diemen, according to TenneT. Staff members are currently on site and are investigating the exact cause.

“Once we know the cause, we will be able to say how long it will take to get power supplies back on line,” a spokesman for the company said.

Twitter has reported that some hospitals in Amsterdam have been left without power, while the tram and metro networks are also not running in the capital. Thousands of people have been stuck in trains and trams, as well as on the subway because the doors will not open.

All flights to and from Schiphol have been canceled. The air facility is one of Europe’s busiest and flights had been briefly taking off. A spokeswoman said that all incoming flights to the continents fourth-largest airport have been diverted to other regional airports. “We are experiencing a lot of problems due to the outage,” she said, according to Reuters.

The airport tweeted that at 10:45am they were able to get some power back from another source and traffic is slowly starting to pass through the airport.

Police chiefs in Amsterdam say they are putting all their officers on the streets because alarm systems are not working, according to the Dutch website ad.nl.